Methinks America has too much corporate welfare to be called an unplanned economy.

Absolutely true. When you (as a business owner) can be bailed out for the consequences of a poor decision, you are not living in a totally free market. Such bailouts have all sorts of deleterious effects on the rest of the market (including actually encouraging people to engage in risky behavior since they can't actually lose money when the downside happens--this includes everything from reckless investing to lending on the corporate end, but there is also a lot of individual behavior that qualifies). I note though that when this sort of thing happens and the bailouts begin, the "free market" (that we don't actually have) gets the blame for the consequences of the non-free-market part of the system.

Data coming out of the USSR since its ceremonious collapse showed some interesting things:

1.) State planning, by itself, was not indicated as a cause of the economic collapse of the Soviet Union

2.) "Public" ownership, by itself, was not indicated as a cause of the economic collapse of the Soviet Union

3.) Lack of incentive to profit from financial productivity was the primary causative factor in the failure of the Soviet economy.

This is backed up by the experience in the PRC which shows that as long as you address item 3, it works pretty well. The PRC has had one of, if not the, most rapid increase in GDP for several decades running. Their aging population wil cause far more problems than socialism.

Also, Marxism vice Marxism-Lenninism places no premium on how the planning is done. There is no reason why that can't be done in a representative form of government. As a distinction, in the Soviet Union Marxism-Lenninism was an ideology of exported socialism, not dictatorshp. That was Stalin's idea (and Lenin's too as long as he ruled). Vanilla Marxism just refers to an emphasis on Surplus value and the economics of the bourgoise and proletariat.

Unhappily, some idealists are so committed to improving the world THEIR WAY, that they lose patience and and either imprison or kill those who oppose them. Think Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, and others. Idealists all.

Notice, I did not put Marx on the above list. Some or many capitalists are paranoid.

And this, some GOP'ers say socialism is Communism.

A few even say democracy is socialism. Real democracy (not the seriously limited American kind) might lead to a form of socialism: employee ownership of their workplaces.

A book published five years ago claimed that employees own more than eleven thousand American companies. I was scanning the book at the library and was so UNsurprised that I didn't bother to note the title or author.

While living in SF 20 years ago and browsing a bookstore, I found a directory of northern CA companies owned by their employees. I didn't look for the number of such companies.

In the early 1970s, an edition of Harvard Business Review cited two advantages of employee ownership; it's kinder to the environment and there's less employee theft.